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Video Information: 13.07.2023, Gita Samagam English, Greater Noida
The mind’s biggest trick || Acharya Prashant (2024)
📋 Video chapters:
0:00 - Intro
1:00 - Experience vs. Experiencer
4:53 - The Role of Choice in Ego
8:01 - Physical vs. Mental Pain
10:26 - Stillness Amidst Pain
12:35 - Levels of Pain and Pleasure
16:01 - Understanding vs. Doing
Description:
In this conversation, Acharya Prashant talks with a questioner named Julius about the ego and how it works. The ego is like a part of us that wants to feel permanent and unchanging, even though everything around us is always changing. Acharya Prashant explains that this insistence on being unchanging is not just a trick of the mind; it’s a strong belief that the ego holds onto.
They also discuss pain and pleasure, pointing out that these feelings are not the same for everyone. What feels painful to one person might feel pleasurable to another, depending on their body and mind. Acharya Prashant emphasizes that understanding these feelings is more important than trying to act on them. He encourages people to see that the "I" or the self they identify with is not as solid as they think.
Acharya Prashant wants listeners to realize that his teachings are not just facts to memorize but invitations to explore their true potential. He describes the session as a workshop for personal growth, where participants can learn to recognize their conditioned thoughts and discover the choices they have in life. Ultimately, he highlights the importance of understanding ourselves and being aware of our experiences as a way to find deeper truth and meaning in life.
🎧 Listen to Acharya Prashant on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/2QmVEAAnsNE7Xs0MW0Li8Y?si=09fbcbc7c99c469b
Video Information: 13.07.2023, Gita Samagam English, Greater Noida
The mind’s biggest trick || Acharya Prashant (2024)
📋 Video chapters:
0:00 - Intro
1:00 - Experience vs. Experiencer
4:53 - The Role of Choice in Ego
8:01 - Physical vs. Mental Pain
10:26 - Stillness Amidst Pain
12:35 - Levels of Pain and Pleasure
16:01 - Understanding vs. Doing
Description:
In this conversation, Acharya Prashant talks with a questioner named Julius about the ego and how it works. The ego is like a part of us that wants to feel permanent and unchanging, even though everything around us is always changing. Acharya Prashant explains that this insistence on being unchanging is not just a trick of the mind; it’s a strong belief that the ego holds onto.
They also discuss pain and pleasure, pointing out that these feelings are not the same for everyone. What feels painful to one person might feel pleasurable to another, depending on their body and mind. Acharya Prashant emphasizes that understanding these feelings is more important than trying to act on them. He encourages people to see that the "I" or the self they identify with is not as solid as they think.
Acharya Prashant wants listeners to realize that his teachings are not just facts to memorize but invitations to explore their true potential. He describes the session as a workshop for personal growth, where participants can learn to recognize their conditioned thoughts and discover the choices they have in life. Ultimately, he highlights the importance of understanding ourselves and being aware of our experiences as a way to find deeper truth and meaning in life.
🎧 Listen to Acharya Prashant on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/2QmVEAAnsNE7Xs0MW0Li8Y?si=09fbcbc7c99c469b
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00You were explaining the ego as something that takes ownership, that creates its existence
00:12through ownership of action.
00:15You were talking it from the angle of action.
00:17I was thinking if we could talk about it from the angle of experiencing itself.
00:24Because you said earlier that the experience comes first and then that creates the experiencer,
00:34so to speak.
00:35And also that the experiencer and the experience arise and fall together.
00:40So that's the basic duality of the mind.
00:44But this means that there is no static or permanent experience behind any of this.
00:52It's always just like the mirror image of anything experienced.
00:59So why is there the illusion of a continuity there?
01:04Because all of us experience ourselves as static entities.
01:11We have a static...
01:12No, no.
01:13That's not an illusion.
01:14That's an insistence.
01:15Insistence.
01:16That's an insistence.
01:20That's a particular stubbornness, not an observation, not even a deduction.
01:27It's an insistence.
01:29See there is something that does not change.
01:38And the very insistence of the ego is to claim that it is that.
01:48I am that.
01:52And that is called the truth.
01:54That which does not change and therefore in some sense has a continuity.
02:00If the ego accepts that it is changing every moment by virtue of its association with ever
02:07changing Prakriti, then the ego will have to drop its claim of being that which is unchangeable.
02:14Please understand.
02:17The ego is stuck in a difficult position.
02:20On one hand, it has to say it is that which is the truth, right?
02:28And truth alone exists.
02:30But for its existence, the ego must cling to Prakriti because without Prakriti the ego
02:36has no existence.
02:38The ego can never say I am.
02:41The ego always says I am P.
02:45And P can be P1 till Pn.
02:47Anything in Prakriti.
02:50So the ego has to cling to Prakriti to have existence.
02:55It must have existence, why?
02:57Because truth exists.
03:00Truth exists and the ego's insistence is that I am the truth.
03:05I am that.
03:07So the ego must first of all say, prove that I exist.
03:11To exist it clings to Prakriti.
03:16But the second thing about truth is that not only does it exist, it exists unchangeably.
03:21Nitya.
03:22So the ego is in, I said, a difficult spot.
03:29On one hand, it has to prove its existence.
03:32On the other hand, it has to prove its existence by sticking to someone that is continuously
03:36changing.
03:37So the ego tells itself, stuff is changing, I am not.
03:43Stuff is changing, I am not.
03:45My age is changing.
03:48I just changed jobs.
03:52I just changed my shirt.
03:56The point is to prove to itself that there did exist someone unchanged even while the
04:03shirt was being changed.
04:07The fact is, with the change of the shirt, you too have changed.
04:12The ego is lying to itself.
04:15But the ego says, you know, I changed shirts, which means the shirts changed, I did not.
04:21You did, don't lie.
04:24And if you could be someone who does not change with the change of shirts, then you are home.
04:35This is just something very hard to get because I think in a previous session you also, I
04:43think you said that the ego is a choice in some sense.
04:47Now you are using the word insistence.
04:51It's very...
04:52When I say the ego is a choice, that's the teaching.
04:59When I say the ego insists to live a choiceless and dead life, that's the fact.
05:07One thing is how the reality is.
05:11The other thing is where I want to take you to.
05:17In most people, there is no choice, but potentially the choice can exist.
05:25So whenever I will teach, I will talk continuously of choices.
05:29Please understand that when I'm talking of choices, I'm not talking of choices as if
05:32they already exist.
05:34By talking of choices, I'm invoking choices.
05:38I'm not talking of pre-existing choices because for most people there are no choices.
05:45So when I say you have a choice, I'm not pointing to a choice that you already have.
05:49When I say you have a choice, I'm actually invoking a choice.
05:55It's not as if you already have it.
05:58It's like going to a sleeping man and telling him loudly, you are awake.
06:04Is he really awake?
06:07But when you will loudly tell him that he is awake, he will wake up.
06:13So you are not telling him his current state.
06:16You are trying to bring about a change in his current state.
06:20So choice is not what you have.
06:22Choice is what you need to have.
06:34When the great sages tell you, you are the Atman, do you look at your face and find the
06:38Atman there?
06:42When the realized ones tell you, you are the pure self, are they telling you the facts
06:47of your life?
06:48No.
06:49They are telling you the potentiality that you have.
07:03Therefore the lesson is, the teaching must not be taken as just a description of the
07:13fact of our life.
07:15This is not a lecture hall.
07:17You would have understood by now, it is a workshop.
07:19In a lecture hall, you just listen.
07:20In a workshop, you actively create something.
07:23This is a workshop.
07:26The choice is being created here.
07:29You are not just here to listen, you are here to go through active transformation in this
07:35moment itself.
07:47But then we still have the word insistence you just used.
07:51Yes.
07:52That would imply...
07:54That insistence, Julius, is the resistance to the teaching.
08:01The ego must insist that it is the truth already, therefore it must resist the teaching.
08:12Because if you are the truth already, if you are the truth already, then somebody is just
08:16wasting your time telling you all these wonderful sounding things.
08:21You are already the truth.
08:22Why do you need to listen to all this?
08:23Yeah, but isn't that the thing that you can never claim it because when the truth is in
08:28operation, you are not really there to experience anything.
08:32That too depends on how severe your insistence is.
08:40Because there can be no two truths, right?
08:43If you are already the truth, why would you pay heed to an alternate truth?
08:52The first thing, therefore, is to acknowledge, well, you know, the insistence has to be dropped.
09:00You need to continue on this, but I think now is not a good time.
09:07But I have one more thing from the verse itself, if that's okay.
09:11No, that's okay.
09:12And it's a good time.
09:13No issues.
09:14Yeah.
09:15Yeah.
09:16I mean, we have things to continue from here, but right now I just don't have anything to...
09:22I'm not sure what to carry on, but we'll get there.
09:26But from the verse itself, it uses the word that notions of heat and cold, of pain and
09:32pleasure are born only of the contact of the senses with their objects.
09:38And I'm not sure if it's a thing with the translation, but I got the impression that
09:48the notion of something being painful or pleasurable is in the experience itself.
09:53But is it really so?
09:55Because we need to use the conditioning to interpret something as painful or pleasurable,
10:04right?
10:05I mean, how do I say that something is likeable or dislikeable to me?
10:11Is the thing with the word notion?
10:14Yeah, like the notions of pain and pleasure are born only of the contact of the senses
10:22with the objects.
10:23No, it's a bit with the translation.
10:24The word here is shitoshna-sukha-dukha-daha.
10:31So the givers of the feeling of hot and cold and sukha-dukha, which is pain pleasure.
10:39So all that is coming from just the contact of senses with the prakritic world.
10:49So notion is not really there in the verse.
10:54It's coming from the translation.
10:56Yeah, it's just confusing because I've actually, the last time we spoke, I was saying that
11:07I'm reading Nisargadatta, and right afterwards, I actually went pretty fast to Yuji Krishnamurti.
11:16And there, you know, the thing that has really hit me from there is that it really feels
11:26like that these kind of experiences of duality are kind of born out of the demand for pleasure
11:37to avoid pain.
11:40And it feels like that if there's no movement, if there's no demand to feel pleasurable,
11:47then it feels like that the mind is not in operation.
11:51Now, does this make sense?
11:54I'm just thinking if this is even pertinent to the verse right now, but it just came to my mind because
12:05it feels like that the verse says that this physical nature is painful or pleasurable as it is.
12:13But is it really?
12:15How can we know it as pleasurable or painful without being conditioned to feel something about it?
12:25But that's exactly what the verse is saying.
12:28Then I'm just not understanding.
12:31Okay.
12:32Pain and pleasure come at two levels.
12:36One is physical, one is mental.
12:38Let's look at the physical thing.
12:39Right?
12:40I don't know swimming.
12:41You put me in water.
12:44I don't know swimming.
12:45You put me in water.
12:46What is that to me?
12:47Pain.
12:48Right?
12:49I don't know swimming.
12:54You have thrown me into a pond.
12:56I'm going to be asphyxiated.
13:00Finished.
13:01And you have just taken out a fish from the pond and you throw it back into the water.
13:07What is that for the fish?
13:09Pleasure.
13:10Pleasure.
13:11So pain and pleasure depend on my prakritic composition that the difference is just bodily.
13:17Right?
13:18My lungs are not designed to extract oxygen from water.
13:24I can have oxygen only from air.
13:26But if you look at the fish, its body is designed to extract oxygen even from water.
13:33So the fish happily lives there.
13:36Difference is just physical.
13:37And the physical difference becomes the difference between pain and pleasure.
13:41That's what he is saying.
13:44Right?
13:45Now come to the mind.
13:49So I am attached to, let's say, my nationality.
13:57And someone else is attached to his.
14:01And these two nations are at war.
14:05A and B belong to their respective nations.
14:10And then you receive the news that A's nation is winning.
14:16This is pleasure for A and pain for B. Because their mental constitution is different.
14:24So that exactly is the point.
14:26That your pain and pleasure are defined by your physical and mental constitution.
14:31There is nothing absolute in them.
14:34They are relative to who you are.
14:38And who you are is again a function of what your experiences have turned you into.
14:45So there is nothing there in for you.
14:48You have been made by your experiences and according to what you have been made, you
14:53decode your experiences as pain or pleasure.
14:56Where are you in all this?
15:00The emphasis is on seeing the non-existence of what you call as the I.
15:09That's all.
15:13But in some sense, if the I is not, then can there be any experience?
15:19Because can there be such a thing as just experience?
15:24Because if we say that there's just experience, then we'll ask that for whom exactly?
15:32It has to be to the conditioned entity, right?
15:36Yeah.
15:37But the conditioned entity need not be you.
15:43But how can I separate myself from it and say that I am nothing else?
15:48That's what the entire session was about.
15:51Surprising yourself.
15:54Obviously, you throw me into the water and I don't know swimming.
16:05So there will be pain.
16:08There will be pain.
16:10But can I look at the pain with a stillness that does not naturally come to a drowning
16:20person?
16:23Not sure whether that would save me from drowning.
16:27But it's still of great value.
16:32There would be pain.
16:38There would be pleasure.
16:39But I have to see that I am not the experiencer of those things.
16:45Not that the experience would cease.
16:49Just that the experiencer is not who I am.
16:53No, I mean, I get it because I've used this so much as a method almost during these years.
17:03But sometimes it just feels like even something like this is so easy to co-opt.
17:08It just becomes the same structure, you know.
17:11And I guess that's why reading Yuji has been so refreshing because he really denies everything
17:19like this.
17:20He just says what actually you said earlier also, that there's nothing you can do.
17:25And it's very good to hear sometimes because you just realize that you're not really doing
17:31anything.
17:32But you can, you can, there's something you can do if it can be called doing it all, which
17:38is understanding.
17:40Otherwise, even Yuji is incomprehensible.
17:47Even if he tells you, you can do nothing, still you are doing something just to get
17:52those words.
17:53That's called understanding.
17:55That's understanding.
17:56And that's what all spirituality is about.
17:59Understanding.
18:00That clarifies it very well, actually, I felt kind of a friction there sometimes reading
18:12him.
18:13But yeah, no, there's no, no friction.
18:18I hope that I have some miracles on my way.